You May Now Kill the Bride

by Deborah Donnelly

  I smacked him on the shoulder and climbed out of the car. “You behave yourself. I’ve got enough trouble with these people, so help me out here. Play up to them, OK?”

  “Anything you say, Stretch. Send in the clowns.”

  But it wasn’t a clown who answered the door. It was a dragon.

  “Well!” said Adrienne, startled, and blinked at Aaron from behind her round red glasses. She wore a tailored blouse in the same shade of red, stylish white trousers, and a far less furious expression than when I’d seen her last. “I didn’t know we had another guest coming.”

  Then I was the one who was startled, because Aaron started playing up in a big way.

  “Aaron Gold, here for the wedding. Hope you don’t mind me barging in.” He offered Adrienne his very best smile, the one he keeps under the bar for special customers. “Say, are you the one who restored a vintage Piper Cub? I did a piece on classic Cubs for The Boston Globe once . . .”

  As we followed her though the house Aaron laid it on with a trowel, and by the time we emerged onto the back deck he had the dragon nibbling from the palm of his hand. It was like watching a lion tamer at work.

  Out on the deck, Owen was reading The Wall Street Journal and Mom was arranging a jar of wildflowers, lacy white daisies and pale blue chicory and the creamy heads of Queen Anne’s lace. The two of them looked gracious and relaxed, and the luncheon table was positively photogenic, with bright linens striped like beach umbrellas and wineglasses twinkling in the sun.

  I could just see the photo spread in Sunset magazine: “Island Luncheon Al Fresco” or “A Savory San Juan Spread.” Now if we could just avoid “Future In-laws Feud Over Food.”

  “There you are, Carrie,” my mother said. “And Aaron, how lovely to see you!”

  She gave him a quick hug and a peck on his left cheek, without a single glance at the scar on his right. Nicely done, Mom.

  “I hear you have good news, Louise,” said Aaron.

  She blushed and nodded. “Owen, you’ve met Aaron Gold, haven’t you?”

  “Of course,” said the lord of the manor in his bluff, confident way. “I remember you from Sun Valley. Lou told me how you got caught in that fire. Hell of a thing.”

  “Has it been dreadful, dear?”

  There was no pity in Mom’s voice, just friendly concern, and Aaron answered in kind.

  “Dreadful to the power of ten. But I’m through the worst of it.” He changed the subject, a bit awkwardly, by looking up at the rear facade of the house. “This is a remarkable building. Turn of the century?”

  “Right around 1905,” said Owen, gratified. “Down at the heels when I found it, but the remodel did wonders.”

  “You kept the best of the architecture, though,” said Aaron. “That’s good to see in these old Victorians. Maybe I could get a tour later on?”

  “You bet. Ah, here’s my other daughter. Kimberly, come meet Carrie’s friend Aaron.”

  “Call me Kimmie,” she cooed, sashaying up from the tennis court with racket in hand.

  Kimmie’s little white skirt and halter top displayed a golden crescent of midriff and about a mile of leg. She flicked a glance at Aaron’s scar, took in the rest of him with a lingering appraisal, and fluttered her lashes so hard I could feel the breeze.

  “Any friend of Carrie’s is a friend of mine.”

  She might as well have said, “Any man of hers is fair game for me.” I tried to catch Aaron’s eye, but he was smiling blandly and peering down Kimmie’s cleavage. It occurred to me suddenly that pain pills on an empty stomach can be very relaxing.

  “Sit down, all of you,” said my mother, “and I’ll bring out lunch. No, Owen, you stay there and visit. Carrie, come get another place setting.”

  They took their seats at the table, with Kimmie narrowly beating out her sister for the chair next to Aaron. He dropped me an exaggerated wink as I followed Mom inside.

  “You should have told me Aaron was coming after all!” she fussed, but it was a happy fussing.

  “It was a last-minute thing. Here, let me take that.”

  I relieved her of a bowl of pasta salad and a platter of grilled chicken. There was another platter, of roasted vegetables ringed by lemon wedges, and a plate of shortbread cookies spiraled with raspberry jam.

  “Wow, who made all this?”

  She laughed sheepishly. “The caterer at the Hotel de Haro! Owen has an account with them, and they deliver. I’m getting so spoiled.”

  “Well, you deserve to be spoiled.”

  She patted my shoulder. “Thank you for coming, dear. I know you’re making an effort, and I appreciate it. Besides, it’s such fun to see our fellows together.”

  As she held the screen door for me, I took in the scene at the table. Mom’s fellow was nodding thoughtfully at something my fellow was saying, while Kimmie and her breasts paid close attention. Then Adrienne, determined to stay in the game, handed Aaron a wineglass with the bold air of a chess player advancing a pawn.

  I hurried to join them before anybody started tearing anybody’s clothes off—and before I started tearing out anyone’s hair.

  But lunch turned out to be surprisingly pleasant after all, at least at first. Adrienne deigned to be civil to me, no doubt due to Aaron’s presence, and Owen made an excellent host. I actually relaxed and enjoyed myself. As the wine flowed and the platters emptied, our conversation ranged from the Winters’ house to their many summers in the San Juans to the charms of the Pacific Northwest versus those of New England.

  “I’ve never been there,” I said. “But I’d love to—”

  “Never?” Kimmie made it sound like I’d never tried indoor plumbing. She inched her chair closer to Aaron’s. “I go all the time. I adore New England. The fall colors, and those quaint little Vermont fishing villages . . .”

  “Last time I looked, Vermont was landlocked,” said Adrienne dryly. “Are you sure you aren’t you thinking of Maine?”

  “That’s what I meant,” snapped Kimmie. “Dree, you’re always so—”

  Owen cleared his throat. “Carrie, tell us more about this wedding you’re putting on. I understand it’s going to be at the Nyquists’ farm?”

  I described the plans for Sunday’s ceremony, and in a heady moment of camaraderie I invited them all to the party at ZZ’s on Saturday night. Lily had already suggested this, but I’d been hesitant. Now the look on Mom’s face told me I’d done just the right thing.

  “Why, thank you,” said Owen. “Sounds real fun.”

  Adrienne made a sour little grimace. “Barbecue has never been my favorite—”

  But her father didn’t hear her, or maybe didn’t want to. He continued, “I’ve been wanting to ask about Made in Heaven. I admire anyone who can keep a small business going these days. Tell us how you got started with weddings.”

  Who could resist a flattering opening like that? As we finished our meal I told the tale of my bridal career, trying to make it brief but entertaining. Owen leaned forward to listen, Mom looked proud of her little girl, and Aaron threw in an amiable wisecrack or two.

  But Kimmie sighed restlessly and let her gaze wander, and Adrienne positively bristled at my taking center stage. She listened silently at first, but she didn’t stay silent for long.

  “So my partner Eddie is the money man,” I was saying. “He keeps the books and—”

  “I suppose he’ll post bail if you’re arrested,” she said in that harsh, sardonic voice. “Having the police show up with a search warrant must have been quite a shock.”

  Mom dropped her fork. “Search warrant?”

  “Oh, didn’t you tell her?” asked Adrienne, innocently polishing her red eyeglasses on a napkin. I had a sudden vision of stamping them underfoot until the lenses splintered. “Apparently I’m not the prime suspect for Guy’s murder anymore.”

  The blood drained from my mother’s face, and a babble of overlapping voices arose. Mom’s was dismayed and Owen’s was baffled, with Kimmie giggling and Aaron pro
testing that it was routine, just police routine.

  “I didn’t say she was guilty, for heaven’s sake,” said Adrienne archly. “I was just making an observation.”

  I said nothing at all, but I was thinking furiously. How had she found out about Orozco? Same old answer, I supposed. It was a small island. I gritted my teeth and turned away, just to quell my desire to slap her.

  So I was the one who spotted India Doyle trotting around the side of the house with her mane rippling in the breeze.

  “Hi, there!” she sang out. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

  The table fell silent.

  “Oops, guess I’m interrupting lunch. But that’s all right, I’m fasting today. I do a juice fast for twenty-four hours every two weeks, to cleanse my system. You feel so much lighter . . .”

  I didn’t expect Owen to throw her out, exactly, but I did expect some kind of indignant refusal to let reporters invade his home at this touchy time. But apparently India was a familiar visitor to the Winter household, if not a universally welcome one.

  As she prattled on about wheat-grass juice or some damn thing, Owen reluctantly brought her a chair, and Mom poured her a tumbler of water with a kind of resigned courtesy. Adrienne, having lobbed her little grenade, merely sniffed and went inside. Kimmie gave India a desultory greeting and then busied herself trying to charm Aaron onto the tennis court.

  “Just one game?” she wheedled. “If you don’t play I could teach you. I’m a wonderful teacher.”

  “I’ll just bet you are,” he said, grinning lewdly. Pain pills and wine, wonderful. I kicked him under the table and he jumped. “But thanks anyway.”

  So Kimmie flounced off to practice her serve, and Aaron turned his tipsy attention to India.

  “Carnegie was just telling me about you,” he said. “I’m a reporter myself.”

  “A real reporter?” she squeaked. If she noticed his scar at all, she didn’t show it. “I mean, for a real paper?”

  “Well, fairly real . . .”

  I wanted to ask what she’d learned about Guy—and I wanted in on that conversation—but Mom asked me to help her with the dessert and coffee. Once again, Owen offered to assist and she declined.

  “You’ve been waiting on me since I got here,” she said gaily. “Turnabout is fair play.”

  But once she had me alone in the kitchen, Mom shut the door furtively.

  “Are they really going to arrest you, Carrie? I’m sure Owen knows the best lawyers—”

  “Of course not! And you don’t have to whisper. I told Aaron all about it, and India was there when it happened.”

  She rolled her eyes, the way she used to roll them at me and my brother when we tried her patience.

  “India’s always on the spot, isn’t she? Her father is an important colleague of Owen’s, so we’ve tried to be nice to her, but—”

  “But now you can’t get rid of her?”

  “Exactly. Never mind India, though. What’s all this about a search warrant?”

  I explained, making it sound as insignificant as possible, and of course I didn’t tell her about Moonface tailing me.

  “So you’re not worried?”

  “Not a bit, and I don’t want you worrying either. We’ll have our visit, and Lily will have her wedding, and everything will be fine. All right?”

  “All right, dear. If you say so.”

  We started the coffee and brought out the shortbread, to find Aaron and India with their heads together, laughing at some journalistic joke, and Owen pushing his chair back from the table.

  “No dessert for me, Lou. Nice to see you, India.”

  “Wait,” she said, “I still need to get an interview. If that’s all right?”

  That tight, angry look I had learned to dread came into Owen’s eyes. “I thought this was a social call.”

  “Well, not exactly. I’m working on a profile of Guy Price, sort of an extended obituary, you know? I’ve been talking to different people who knew him, and I thought since you were his employer—”

  “I have nothing to say for the newspaper.” He stood up.

  “Oh, it can be off the record,” she said, rising as well, but I could have told her she was wasting her time. Owen’s expression was like a thunderhead, growing darker and more threatening by the minute.

  “I said, I have nothing—”

  “Just general background, kind of an impression of his personality, or maybe some ideas about who else I should interview? Like if he had any special, um, romantic friends—”

  “I said no, dammit!”

  India stood between Owen and the kitchen door, and as he moved to get around her his foot caught in a chair leg. He shook off the chair so viciously that it crashed into the girl, making her yelp in pain and surprise. Mom, moving out of the way, bumped into me and dropped the dessert plate, sending sugary fragments and crockery shards every which way.

  The screen door slammed behind Owen so hard that it bounced back open, hit the wall of the house, and then slammed shut again.

  “At real papers,” said Aaron, into the ensuing silence, “we call that ‘No comment.’ ”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Aaron never did get his tour of the house, because Owen didn’t come downstairs again. Mom followed him up while India, Aaron, and I cleaned up the mess on the deck. True to form, Kimmie just kept on thwacking her tennis balls.

  After a few minutes Mom returned, to apologize with a wan smile. “He’s not quite himself today. . . .”

  Or is he showing his real self? I wondered. Whichever it was, I resented his leaving my mother in this awkward situation.

  “No problem,” I told her. “We should take off anyway.”

  “I understand. You and Aaron must have a lot of catching up to do.” She escorted the three of us through the house and paused on the veranda to say good-bye. “Aaron, you will join us for a picnic tomorrow, won’t you? We’re taking the Dreamer to the prettiest little island.”

  “I’d love to, but—”

  In her own motherly way, she ignored his last word. “Wonderful! They’re saying it might rain, but not until later in the day. I’m so happy you’ll be with us.”

  I was too, but not so happy when India started shifting wistfully from foot to foot and looking hopeful. Mom, no doubt mindful of Owen’s rudeness to the girl, sighed and said, “You too, India, if you’d like to come . . . ?”

  She spoke without enthusiasm, but our young scribe leapt at the chance like a yellow Lab who’s been offered a walk.

  “I’d love to! I’ve got a big hole in my schedule because the city-council meeting was postponed. It must be karma, don’t you think, Lou?”

  I sighed myself. A little of India Doyle went a very long way. And I’d have to get used to this “Lou” business. No more “Carrie” from the bitch sisters, though. I’ve had it with that.

  I kissed my mother on the cheek and led the way down the steps to the driveway, with India tagging along. Her VW was parked right behind the rental car.

  “So, where to now?” Aaron tossed his keys jauntily into the air and bobbled them on the way down, letting them drop to the gravel with a clang.

  I said, “Why don’t I drive for a while?”

  He shrugged indifferently, and as I plucked up the keys I thought of a way to kill two birds with one stone. I still needed to hear what India had found out about Guy, and I still needed some caffeine.

  “How about the café down in Roche Harbor? Then India can tell us—”

  “Ohh, no,” said Aaron. “I’m on vacation, remember? And I’ve been stuck in my sister’s apartment for months. I want to explore the island. See the sights, take a long walk on a beach somewhere.”

  “All right.” Maybe fresh air would clear his head. “But I’m not sure where . . .”

  “How about American Camp?” said India. “South Beach is great for walking, and there’s the historical park where the soldiers were stationed during the Pig War.”

  Aaron pe
rked up. “Of course—this is where the Pig War happened.”

  “I knew it,” I groaned. “Right up your alley.”

  “American Camp it is,” he said cheerily. “India, lead the way!”

  Half an hour later we were at the south end of the island, where the scenery contrasted dramatically with the area around Roche Harbor. Instead of wooded hills and cozy inlets, we drove across a wide and treeless prairie of oatmeal-colored grasses, enlivened by the occasional scampering rabbit or the shadow of a hawk who’d ordered rabbit with a side of field mice for lunch.

  South Beach is a long, windswept stretch of pebbles, with the Strait of Juan de Fuca stretching out vast and blue on one hand and tall crumbling cliffs of stone and sand rising on the other. We crunched along, our faces to the wind—with me quite deliberately in the middle.

  The beauty of the place soothed my ruffled feathers considerably, though. The gulls wheeled and cried, and long straight ripples combed the calm water to break at our feet in lacy edges of foam. It was an effort to bring my thoughts back to murder.

  “So what have you found out, India? Who have you interviewed so far?”

  “They’re not even interviews, really. Most people seemed to like Guy, but nobody wants to say much about him. Not to me, anyway.” She craned around me to ask Aaron plaintively, “How do you get people to talk when they don’t want to?”

  “You can’t,” he said with a shrug, not breaking stride on the pebbles. “But you can get them to talk about themselves and then slide in the question you really want answered. People love to talk about themselves. Is that a city out there?”

  He shaded his eyes with one hand and pointed to a low peninsula in the middle distance, where the windows of tiny buildings winked in the sun.

  “That’s Victoria, on the tip of Vancouver Island,” she told him. “Canada sort of curls around the San Juans, with the border running down the middle of the strait.”

  “Very interesting,” I said. “Now, the questions we want to ask about Guy—”

  “So that’s the border they were disputing.” Aaron stopped and looked around enthusiastically. His buzz had worn off, but now he was high on history. “There was a big standoff, major international tension. The British sent warships, and the American army had hundreds of soldiers here. Did you know that George Pickett, of Pickett’s Charge, was in command?”